The Jam
Paul Weller was 15 when he formed the Jam, and for some time to come the outsize emotions of youth would supply both the fuel and the subject matter for his feverish rave-ups. “Life is a drink and you get drunk / When you’re young,” he declared on one of the band’s later anthems. By the time the British power trio landed a contract with Polydor in 1977, Weller was obsessed by the 60s ideal of youth culture as a social and political force, and the Jam’s initial clumsy embrace of the Who’s mod mythology–power chords, two-tone shoes, Union Jacks draped over their amps–sprang from Weller’s sincere ambition to unite his own g-g-generation against England’s fossilized class system.
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Weller spent the rest of the 80s making an ass of himself with Style Council, a puerile blend of white soul, sanctimonious Marxism, and tony Euro-fashion, before coming to his senses in 1994 with the folk-influenced solo record Wild Wood. And even as contemporaries like the Clash and the Sex Pistols find a new audience among Green Day punks, the Jam has faded from memory. Not even WXRT can bring itself to spin “Town Called Malice” anymore.
Setting Sons grew from a cycle of songs about three friends who grow up and apart, and while the concept never panned out, many of the songs reveal Weller’s frustration with the creeping compromises of adulthood. In “Thick as Thieves,” one of the lads reflects: “Something came along that changed our minds / I don’t know what and I don’t know why / But we seemed to grow up in a flash of time / While we watched our ideals helplessly unwind.” The song’s final chorus is a bitter pun: “We’re no longer as thick as thieves, no / We’re not as thick as we used to be.”
When Weller split the Jam, his decision seemed impulsive, premature, but in retrospect his instincts were right on target. In England, its last seven singles had charted in the top five, and sooner or later it would have cracked the American market. Had Weller stuck it out, the Jam likely would have become another U2: a huge, international rock act prone to grand, heroic, and ultimately blank gestures. Instead, Weller sealed the Jam in amber, ensuring that, like the Beatles, his band would always represent rock’s limitless possibilities. Nothing makes youth seem more attractive than leaving it behind.
